The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!

Saturday, December 12, 2015

The Atlantic brings a dose of reality to the refugee debate

There's a very good article in The Atlantic discussing the dilemma of admitting large numbers of Middle Eastern 'refugees' to the USA, and examining the successful (or otherwise) assimilation of their predecessors. Here's an excerpt.

Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.

. . .

Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Denmark.

How’s that going?

[The article examines in detail many aspects of Somali refugee life, and concludes that it's not going well at all.]

. . .

... immigrants to the United States are dividing into two streams. One arrives educated and assimilates “up”; the other, larger stream, arrives poorly educated and unskilled and assimilates “down.” It almost ceases to make sense to speak and think of immigration as one product of one policy. Without ever having considered the matter formally or seriously, the U.S. has arrived at two different policies to serve two different sets of interests—and to achieve two radically different results, one very beneficial to U.S. society; the other, fraught with huge present and future social difficulties.

How did this happen? Almost perfectly unintentionally, suggests Margaret Sands Orchowski in her new history, The Law That Changed the Face of America. The Immigration Act of 1965 did two things, one well understood, one not: It abolished national quotas that effectively disfavored non-European immigration—and it established family reunification as the supreme consideration of U.S. immigration law. That second element has surprisingly proven even more important than the first. A migrant could arrive illegally, regularize his status somewhere along the way—for example, by the immigration amnesty of 1986—and then call his family from home into the United States after him. The 1965 act widened the flow of post-1970 low-skilled illegal immigration into a secondary and tertiary surge of further rounds of low-skilled immigration that continues to this day.

I'm an immigrant myself (a legal one, of course). I understand something of the challenges of adapting to a new society, different in many respects from the one I left behind. However, for refugees from a Third World background the challenges of adaptation and assimilation are far greater - so much so that many don't assimilate to their new homelands at all.

This article's a good primer on the reasons why that's the case, and highlights the dangers of simply admitting refugees because we feel sorry for them and want to help them. I think a very good case can be made for erecting refugee camps and care facilities in safe areas near their homelands (made safe, if necessary, by armed intervention), and then encouraging the refugees to get the education they need to transform their own societies from within. There's no reason why our national society and its institutions should be burdened by having to deal with their cultural, social and political problems.

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.

'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, birthplace or origin.But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here and that is the English language. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.'

If one is looking for groups that not only haven't assimilated but refuse to, one can begin with blacks who, arguably, have stronger claims to beneficial Americanization than more recent, and voluntary, arrivals.

I find it interesting how many groups arrive here and partake of the beneficence of American society without not only sharing in the responsibility for it, but actively protesting against it.

The text you quote includes, How did this happen? Almost perfectly unintentionally, suggests Margaret Sands Orchowski in her new history, which is laughable. Teddy Kennedy's 1965 bill was intentionally about cutting off the majority of immigrants of the time, and changing the US culture from primarily European to primarily not.

We have an American culture and it's derived from European libertarian thinkers of the enlightenment. Kennedy wanted to turn us more into Latin America and Asia. It has been remarkably successful at turning us into a third world country. This president is simply the latest in a long string of anti-American progressives who want to "remold the world to their heart's desire", as the Fabian Socialists say.